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Topic: S/O Beggars, Moochers and Scammers (Read 946553 times)

We have procedures for our sales queue if someone comes in using the relay system as some of them are using fraudulent details to sign up services. Some of my co-workers have politely declined callers using that system as the communication works a certain way back and forth between the caller, the operator and the sales person.

Back in my relay days, we dealt with lots of people using the internet-based relay system for scams (yet oddly, no one seemed to want to go for confirming that one actually was deaf, hearing-impaired or speech disabled as a way of weeding this stuff out ... 99% of the internet calls were scams or stupid people who thought they were clever by trying to get the relay operators to read nasty perverted stuff). Anyway, we did have criteria we could use to weed out the scams, and if you hit four markers, we could get the call terminated. So she got this email that hit three markers right off the bat.

My coworker also does a sideline business of those 'have a selling party in your home' variety (not the only way to get the merchandise, but primary). She gets an email from someone who has no credit cards and wants to send her a cashier's check for three of the most expensive item that she has in her catalog (that is, three identical items). She kept corresponding with him, I don't know what she ended up doing ... but I did warn her that it smelled like scam and explained how the cashier's check could burn her.

On a quick aside regarding relay services. I would be very careful about when/how you decline relay calls. If the call starts and your criteria for 'scam' are being met, then yes by all means politely hang up. But if you hang up before the caller even states what they want, it's really rather rude and you're shorting the company a chance to satisfy a customer. Most relay services now require users to register with personal information before they can make calls. This has cut down on scams - not entirely, but it has. If a complaint is made to Sprint relay service for example, they can be compelled via police action to provide the registration information connected to the account that made the scam call. I acknowledge some scams are still attempted, but I submit to you that many of those calls probably would have been scamming calls even if the caller wasn't using relay.

As a deaf person who uses relay, I cannot tell you how frustrated and angry I become when people simply hang up as soon as they hear 'relay' even though the registration system has been in place for years. I honestly blame bad company training for this, because companies should be training customers in how to handle incoming relay calls, especially in medical-related fields like pharmacies and labs. (I had a phone operator for a blood-draw lab actually start yelling at my operator about how relay calls were "NOT PERMITTED" and I "CANNOT CALL THERE AGAIN." caps hers. I did complain but nothing came of it.)

Wasn't sure whether to post this here or in Special Snowflakes, but it seems to fit here best. I was at Walmart this morning, and trying to get everything unloaded into my car when 2 women approached me. I don't usually mind giving someone a couple of bucks, but her exact words were, "Can you spare a couple of dollars? I'm trying to get home and my Cadillac is out of gas." Yes, her Cadillac! I politely said no, and they went on. When I left the parking lot, I pulled into the drive through of a McDonald's, and they were in front of me, in a brand new Cadillac. I watched as they gave the guy at the window a fist full of $1.00 bills, and then, while they were waiting for their food, they dumped trash out of their car all over the drive through pavement.

Wasn't sure whether to post this here or in Special Snowflakes, but it seems to fit here best. I was at Walmart this morning, and trying to get everything unloaded into my car when 2 women approached me. I don't usually mind giving someone a couple of bucks, but her exact words were, "Can you spare a couple of dollars? I'm trying to get home and my Cadillac is out of gas." Yes, her Cadillac! I politely said no, and they went on. When I left the parking lot, I pulled into the drive through of a McDonald's, and they were in front of me, in a brand new Cadillac. I watched as they gave the guy at the window a fist full of $1.00 bills, and then, while they were waiting for their food, they dumped trash out of their car all over the drive through pavement.

I won't deny anyone money based on driving a Cadillac. A friend of mine had one that was a hand-me-down from a relative. It sucked money for repairs worse than a junker.

Back from a medical, hedge induced hiatus, but does anyone have any experience with randoms trying to add you on skype? My Dad has a very persistent one from Haiti. What is that about?

Boobs, probably. And links to webcams that offer even more. For a fee, of course!

Either that or confusion. Long ago I used to get guys on another chat client trying to add me, seemingly for dating purposes. They wanted girls in Alexandria, which I was... Virginia, that is. They were in Alexandria, Egypt. Bit too much long distance for me. :-)

Logged

What part of v_e = \sqrt{\frac{2GM}{r}} don't you understand? It's only rocket science!

"The problem with re-examining your brilliant ideas is that more often than not, you discover they are the intellectual equivalent of saying, 'Hold my beer and watch this!'" - Cindy Couture

I was scammed by someone that lives on the same street last year. Her daughter was in the same class as my DS1 so I vaguely knew her and she gave me a sob story about her husband being away and her bank card being eaten by an ATM and of course it was an online bank and it had no branches she could get money from, and she had no food in the house as she had just defrosted her freezer...and so on.So I gave her £50 I had in the house so that her children could eat. Then a mutual friend told me that she was due in court for sentencing after stealing thousands of pounds from an elderly neighbour, that she was known for "borrowing" money and never paying it back, and that her husband was at home. Queue me being boiling mad and ashamed of myself for letting her con me. I was so upset. She avoided me for weeks and in the end I managed to talk to her husband about the money and he gave it me back. I have to say that anyone giving me the same story now would be given a bag of food and no cash at all.

In short: Local soldiers are having their pictures stolen off the internet and being used in a dating scam.

Nothing new under the sun...there's an old 1960's era episode of Dragnet, where the scammers would get the names of deceased soldiers from the newspaper, then go to their parents/girlfriends with a story about how 'Bob' had asked them to deliver this special gift for them, only it had cost them so much to bring it back from overseas, and they had spent all their money...blah blah blah. Sickening to think of people using the names of military men and women in this way.

A scam that has been going around in my neck of the woods is teenagers/young adults calling elderly folks and saying 'Hi, Grandma(pa). I'm stuck in (whatever) town and need money to fix my car. Can you wire it to me?' Then Grandma(pa) says, 'Is that you, Billy?' and the scammer now has a name to latch onto and manages to get the money sent.

Exactly that happened to my grandma. Some woman called pretending to be me, saying she was stuck in Alabama and needed money to get home. Grandma has dementia and does not remember where I live (which is nowhere near Alabama; not even the same country, in fact), but fortunately when she started lose it she signed control of her finances over to my father, who is an attorney. So when she called him to tell him I had called her from Alabama needing money, Dad obviously knew it was a scam. The most difficult part was calming Grandma down, since she really thought I was in trouble.

Not sure if this is the right thread, but just heard of the two brothers who scammed a guy out of his winning lottery ticket. When I first heard the story about how one of the brothers waited 5 years to cash in the ticket to make sure his girlfriend is not staying for his money, I thought it was weird. Who the heck would wait 5 years to be a millionaire? So I'm both surprised, and not surprised by the update.

Last night me, my brother, his girlfriend and another friend were walking in the city to a restaurant. A thin and unkept guy approached us with the words 'Can I ask something? I'm not going to ask for money!'. We slowed down our pace. He explained that he was stuck here, and his wives backpack with their passports and creditcards are stolen (we rolled our eyes in unison) and my brother interrupted him and he said 'so you ARE going to ask for money!'. No no, the scammer explained - he had a few British pounds that he wanted to exchange with us so he could get to the embassy. brother's girlfriend suddenly recognized the guy and asked out loud 'but didn't you ask the same four months ago?'. My brother suddenly lights up and says 'Oh yeah, that was at the theatre, it was the exact same story!'. The scammer got really angry, stepped towards my brother and yelled 'I'm going to break your nose!' And then he turned around and walked away. We were all kind of startled and flabbergasted.